Season 2018

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• Has fought back impressively to regain his M-Sport Ford World Rally Team driver status after being dropped from the line-up at the end of 2015.

• Enjoyed his best season to date in 2017 as he claimed his first WRC win at Dayinsure Wales Rally GB and finished fifth in the drivers’ points.

• Calm, quiet and modest, he enjoys huge support in his native Wales – a traditional heartland of British rallying.

The story so far

Born into Welsh rally royalty (his father Gwyndaf is a former British champion), Evans started his rallying career in 2007 when he came third in the Fiesta Sporting Trophy. The following year he won the series outright, in both the UK and Ireland.

He won the UK SportTrophy series again in 2010, as well as the Junior British Rally title and the Pirelli Star Driver shoot-out, the prize for which was a funded Group N Subaru Impreza drive in the 2011 British Championship. Evans completed the season with two wins and second place in the championship.

His big break on the international stage came in 2012, when he won the FIA’s young driver category, the WRC Academy Cup. His prize was a funded WRC 2 programme in 2013, plus a job at M-Sport helping to test and develop its R5 and WRC Fiestas.

Evans took one win and two second places in his WRC 2 campaign, but it was his surprise debut in a World Rally Car at Rally Italia Sardegna that really got him noticed. Asked to stand in for an absent Nasser Al-Attiyah with just two days notice, and with a new co-driver, Evans finished a remarkable sixth overall.

That performance convinced M-Sport to offer him a full season at the sport’s highest level in 2014, as team-mate to Mikko Hirvonen. Despite an emphasis on learning, Evans impressed with six top-six finishes and career-best fourth places in Mexico and Germany.

He raised the bar with second at the Tour de Corse in 2015 but was dropped from M-Sport’s top level line-up for 2016. Instead he campaigned a Fiesta R5 in WRC 2 and led the championship for virtually the entire season before eventually taking third.

As the reigning British champion, he returned to the main WRC field in a DMACK World Rally Team Fiesta WRC in 2017 and impressed hugely. Claiming his first win at Dayinsure Wales Rally GB in November convinced M-Sport Ford boss Malcolm Wilson to bring the Welshman back into his team’s line-up for 2018.